"How I Became a Feminist Pornographer"

Woman in lingerie lying on the bed, view from the window.SIMONE BECCHETTI

Madison Young is an award-winning feminist porn director and performer. Here's how she got her start.

I first heard the term "DIY" in the context of music in the late '90s. As someone who was immersed in music and art subcultures that veered from the mainstream, I understood quickly that no one was going to bring our favorite punk bands to our venues. So if we didn’t Do it Ourselves, our voices would go unheard and we would remain in a place of disempowerment—waiting for others to validate our lives, our music, our political interests, and our voices.

Our DIY generation was determined to create space for self-expression by any means necessary, and we did.

It was this DIY spirit that ignited my own desire in founding the feminist DIY Femina Potens Art Gallery in 2000. I was 20 years old. While I was still couch-surfing, I rented a one-car garage in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood. This was the birth spot of our first few DIY art shows. Eventually, I found a secure apartment and got a small loan that let me sign a lease on Femina Potens’ first real storefront location.

To support and supplement my arts organization and my own artistic endeavors, I started my journey into sex work. I quickly started modeling for local fetish photographers and dipped my toes into pornography as a way to support my life as an independent artist. I saw it as simply another extension of my art. It gave me something to make art about—a study of human sexuality and desire—a study of my own sexuality and desire.

I recognized within the feminist and sex worker communities a DIY ethos, again coming from necessity. We were women, queers, and sex workers. People weren’t going to make things happen for us; We had to do it ourselves, or again our voices would not be heard. DIY was a creed, a promise, a vow we made to one another. We were resourceful, working with what we had.

As I continued my study of the pornographic climate of the new millennium, I found a familiar ache rising inside me. I ached with a desire to explore sexuality beyond the prescribed script of pornography that was being repeated time and time again.

If pornography was an art form—which I believe it can be—and the DIY movement depended on the voices of outsiders, utilizing their words, images and music to create social change, couldn’t the DIY art movement and pornography intersect?

I picked up a camera and started reading books on filmmaking. I immersed myself in erotic imagery and lush, compelling films that inspired me, and started deconstructing them.

On a Greyhound bus, on a coffee-stained napkin, I started to storyboard my first film as a feminist pornographer. Less than a year later that film would become Bondage Boob Tube—a vintage stylized kinky feminist bondage film that takes place in a world where pervy orgasms bring their black and white world to color. This film would would earn me my first Feminist Porn Award and more than a decade later ( and 43 films under my belt) I’m still making radical DIY feminist porn.